How old were you when you started cycling?

[jobob]

I biked around a lot in junior high & high school, especially before I got my driver's license with my trusty tres-kewl baby blue CCM 10 speed.

My biggest crash to date knock wood was way back then when I was riding with my best friend on our way back from tennis lessons at the community college across town, and I looked back to say something to her and neglected to notice a station wagon (this of course is mid-70s, no such thing as mini vans or SUVs back then) had stopped directly ahead of me. I saw it just in time to do a perfect 90-degree low-speed T-bone into the back of said station wagon. I kept going over the handlebars and did a face plant into the back door.

When everyone picked me and the bike up from the ground, I was spitting out little bits of tooth which was disconcerting We checked out my bike it looked OK at first, but the front wheel wouldn't turn. It took a moment to figure out that the fork had bent back perfectly symetrically (owing to the precise right angle of my collision ) and the front tire was smooshed back against the downtube. I remember crying "my beautiful bike!!" (see, I was One of Us even back then). Station Wagon Mom - who was understandably a bit shaken up by the fact that a teenager whacked herself into the back of her car - drove me & my bike home and made sure I was OK. I found I had a little inverted v-shaped chunk missing from the bottom of my 2 top front teeth where they met. I hightailed it to my dentist, who found no major damage and filed down my 2 front teeth so the ^ wouldn't be so obvious. (So my 2 top front teeth are to this day about a mm or so shorter than god originally intended)

Dad took the bike back to the bike shop where we bought it, and either they didn't have a replacement light blue fork available or it cost too much (we were not well off and this was the least expensive 10-speed in the bike shop, I think the bike had cost $95 on sale and my parents balked at the price), but next thing I knew they put an uuuugly unpainted steel replacement fork on it. Whaaa, they ruined my beautiful bike.

I still toodled around on it but it wasn't quite the same, I thought it looked so dorky with the steel fork, the rest of it being such a pretty light blue. I brought it with me to college and my BF at the time told me he'd "fix it up" for me but instead he messed it up somehow and it never quite shifted right again. bozo. The bike eventually was stolen but it was no biggie for me by then.

Fast forward almost 25 years. Lee and I decided we were getting entirely too fat so we bought hybrid bikes to toodle around on. He took to it like gangbusters and started losing lots of weight. There was a road bike he was longing for, I urged him to get it, after a few weeks I asked if I could try it, and I wouldn't give it back until I got one of my own. That was Pokey, which marked the start of when I really got into cycling. It was December of 2003, and I had just turned 44.

So there you have it.